Review: Smart We Live in Public Probes Web Genius’ Hubris

Before Sept. 11, before the first dot-com bust, before Facebook, Twitter and YouTube turned mundane daily life into public spectacle, web-smart geeks drank deeply from a giddy zeitgeist cocktail made up of pop-culture adoration, huge sums of money and awesome parties.

Josh Harris entertains investors as his alter ego, Luvvy the clown.Photo courtesy WeLiveInPublic.comAs chronicled in We Live in Public, an unrated indie documentary that opens Friday after racking up accolades on the festival circuit, web pioneer Josh Harris emerged as Manhattan’s nightlife king by hosting marathon shindigs where, as one subject recalls, “Supermodels wearing close to no clothes sat on the laps of nerds who were playing Doom.”

It all goes downhill from there, which makes for a whale of a good story. Firebrand filmmaker Ondi Timoner (DiG!) met Harris at one of those New York free-for-alls and decided to follow him through a succession of bizarre exercises in voyeurism, exhibitionism and mind control, complicated by the new media maven’s financial collapse and his considerable dash of restless hubris.

Winner of the 2009 Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury award, We Live in Public opens Friday in San Francisco and Minneapolis with additional cities to come.

Stitched together from Harris’ own archival footage and video interviews conducted by Timoner, We Live in Public begins as a classic rags-to-riches saga: Harris survives a lonely childhood featuring an unhealthy devotion to TV sitcom Gilligan’s Island and arrives in New York in 1984 with $900. Working initially as an anonymous office drone, Harris forms Jupiter Communications to generate traffic stats for emerging web businesses.

When Jupiter goes public, Harris pockets $80 million and uses the dough to finance webcasting company Pseudo.com. At one point, Harris taunts a 60 Minutes correspondent, predicting his nascent webotainment site will “bury” CBS. As it turns out, Harris proves to be too far ahead of his time.

Participants in the Quiet experiment agree to 24/7 camera surveillance.Photos courtesy Interloper FilmsHarris then masterminds an exercise in fascism, voyeurism and avant garde brainwashing that emerges as We Live in Public‘s most compelling chapter: the Quiet community.

In 1999, Harris pours millions into a Manhattan basement “bunker” rigged with 100 sleeping pods, surveillance cameras, shooting range, translucent shower tents and a banquet table which he promises to keep larded with food and drink. In exchange for free room and board, plus the opportunity to shoot rifles at all hours of the day or night, New York artists agreed to wear orange jumpsuits and subject themselves to questioning by an “interrogation artist” while being videotaped 24 hours a day.

As documented in the film’s sometimes disturbing footage, nothing was off-limits: toilet breaks, sex, showers, fistfights, tearful confessions. Anticipating the role of Big Brother fans who would flock to CBS’ reality-based series a few months later, Harris watched the chaos.

Filmmaker Timoner participated in the experiment herself. She captures the de-evolution of optimistic arty types into semi-deranged test subjects with vivid quick takes that allow viewers to make up their own minds about the test subjects’ behavior.

After the New York police bust Harris’ wild experiment on Jan. 1, 2000, he moves to his next experiment in interactive craziness. He barricades himself and his girlfriend in a 24/7 environment streamed live, via 32 security cams, to a “community” of voyeur/commenters. The website anticipated the vlogging/lifecasting phenomenon that would soon become commonplace, but footage of the couple’s humdrum spats comes as something of a letdown in the documentary.

Harris eventually weans himself off the surveillance cameras and runs out of money. By the end of We Live in Public, he’s found redemption — at least for the time being.

It’s a lot to absorb, but Timoner, who provides the voiceover herself, deftly treads a tightrope between admiration and skepticism for her central character. Though he’s not particularly likable, Harris remains imminently watchable, both on his own terms and as the embodiment of a larger question facing anyone enamored with the internet’s seemingly friendly interface: How much should be shared, and how much should be kept private?